Being the experienced SWA traveler, I size up the crowd and decide it's about half a planeload. So I walk two-thirds of the way back and take a window seat, figuring I'll have at least four rows of buffer between me and the rest of the pack. I have my shoes off, my book out, my stress level sinking fast -- when I see Juan breaking through the knot of bin-stuffers and striding toward me with a big grin on his face. He says he has come to sit with me, and not just in my row -- he plunks down in the center seat, elbow-to-elbow with me, surrounded by rows and rows of vacant seats. I could at least have said, "Hey Juan, take the aisle seat, so we have room to stretch out."
But instead I had a little talk with myself. I said, "Bill, you got yourself pretty attached to the way you thought this trip would be. Now the universe has delivered this man to you. Do not oppose. Take it as a gift." So I ask Juan to tell me his story. He's 43 years old, born in a village near Puerto Vallarta, now a Chicago business owner. Every summer he packs his wife and three children, ages 4, 13 and 17 into the van and drives straight through to Mexico City. From there they continue to Puerto Vallarta, where Juan likes to sit on the beach and stare at the waves. After several days by the ocean, they drive on to the village of his youth, where he used to have horses--and when he tells you that part, you know that on some level, he still has horses.
Juan likes the highway mode of travel. He's a little jittery about this jet. The night before, he had decided to cancel, but he didn't know how to tell the people who were waiting for him on the other end. A friend dropped him off at Midway and said, "Southwest? Only poor people fly Southwest!" But Juan is not poor, and his ticket is paid for by the manufacturer he is going to see.
For 14 years, Juan worked an 8-to-5 job and sold jewelry door-to-door on weekends. After a while, he was making more money on Saturday and Sunday than he was Monday-through-Friday. So he took the plunge and bought a jewelry store. He's been at it for 19 months, and it's been no piece of cake. He hadn't thought through the capital requirements. He started by calling the customary manufacturers and asking if he could buy $200 worth of jewelry at a time -- on credit. They all said no. Eventually, he cold-called a manufacturer he found in The Yellow Pages and they said yes. I ask him why this one said yes when all the others had said no. This is what he tells me:
They came to my store and watched me run my business for six hours. And then they said, "We believe you are an honest man." I started out buying $200 worth of jewelry at a time and paying them back in 30 days. Sometimes I didn't have the money and I would call them and they would say that's okay, pay us when you can. Now I order a kilo at a time. And finally they start telling me I have to come to see how they make the jewelry. They say, "You are ordering from a book. Someday somebody else gives you a book and then you don't order from us anymore. We don't know you. You disappear and we never see you again. So you must come to our factory. We send you a ticket."
That alone is not enough to get Juan on a jet plane. But about this time an uncle who lives in California starts calling him, telling him they have to see each other, it's been too long, almost 20 years. Juan says, "I can get a free ticket!" He calls the manufacturer, and to his astonishment, a ticket on Southwest Airlines arrives 12 hours later.
About 120 miles from LAX, Juan looks at me with a smile and makes a descending motion with his hand. With every foot of lost elevation, he is more relaxed. We cross over the Santa Annas and the LA Basin sprawls before us. I'm looking down on the grandstands, the paddock, the stables, the manicured dirt track of Santa Anita. Juan leans over me like the boy from the long-ago village and says, "Look! Horses!"
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